I’m still vibrating from the excitement of an evening hearing Mark Steyn, Victor Davis Hanson, and Steve Hayward, something I try to share in this post.

Thanks to a kind friend, last night I once again had the inestimable pleasure of attending PRI’s annual gala. This year, Mark Steyn was the keynote speaker, Victor Davis Hanson received the Sir Antony Fisher Freedom Award, and Steven Hayward was the master of ceremonies. Honestly, for someone who is a political junkie and a total fan girl when it comes to good writing and effortless erudition, it doesn’t get better than that.

I hadn’t planned on taking notes because I always flatter myself that I’ll remember what was said. By the time that Hayward had made several hysterical jokes about San Francisco politics and Hanson had made a brief, but powerful, acceptance speech when he received the Sir Antony Fisher Freedom Award, I realized that, if I wanted to share anything with you, I’d better start writing things down. This belated realization is why I can only dredge up a few of the funny, pertinent things Hayward and Hanson said, but can give you fairly complete rundown of Steyn’s speech.

Naturally, because I’d convinced myself my memory was enough, I hadn’t brought any paper to the gala. I therefore ended up scribbling my notes on the little folded name cards PRI put by each place setting at the table.

Even notes, though, are inadequate to conveying the evening’s intellectual content. I can only liken what the three men said to a continuous cascade of verbal diamonds, with me trying to reach in and grab the most pertinent or funny. Given the number and velocity of those falling diamonds, I know that I missed more diamonds than I captured. I hope, though, that the following gives you some idea about being in the same room as three of the best political writers and thinkers working today.

Steven Hayward opened the evening by talking about the political insanity that characterizes San Francisco. Those were some fast falling diamonds, and I wasn’t yet taking notes, so I only caught two to share with you. The first was that “San Francisco is well on its way to making itself a work free drug place.” If you’re like me, and just about everyone else in the audience, it took you a beat before you realized that, not only was Hayward describing accurately San Francisco’s political trajectory, he was having fun with the mantra that employees are in a “drug free work place.”

The second Hayward joke that I caught was his statement that, when he’s in San Francisco, he feels like “bringing a Smith & Wesson to a Smith & Hawken’s city.” What I found especially funny about that joke is that the foo-foo, high falutin’ Smith & Hawkens, which once sent out catalogs that were the gardening equivalent of a J. Peterman Company catalog, now markets itself through Target. I’ll get back to you when I figure out whether that’s a “how the mighty have fallen” thing or a “wow, talk about profitable broad-based marketing” thing.

Victor Davis Hanson was up next, but he spoke with such brevity that by the time I got my brain in gear to grab those verbal diamonds, he’d already finished speaking. VDH mostly wanted to remind us about the importance of Sir Anthony Fisher’s institutions, which are all over the world acting as advocacy centers for free markets and free thinking. He did say, however, that California is becoming a dangerously bifurcated state economically and politically, a point that cropped up again throughout the evening. [Read more…]

In my post about Victor Davis Hanson’s talk, I wrote that the US is the world’s largest coal producer. It turns out that I was wrong. And by “I was wrong,” I mean just that. It was my error, not Hanson’s. I was simultaneously trying to listen to Hanson, eat a divine chocolate dessert, and take notes. That’s not a good combo, and I’m pretty darn sure I misrepresented his statement about US coal production.

Here’s the skinny, from Donkatsu:

U.S. has the world’s largest reserves of coal, almost half of the total, but we are second to China in production of coal. China is now a net importer of coal, which why it is increasingly profitable for the U.S. to export to the world – higher prices.

Russia has a shale formation in West Siberia, Bezhmenov, that is believed to be much larger than North Dakota’s Bakken. However, they need foreign technology to get it out. China has shale gas resources about equivalent to those int he U.S. but most of it is in regions without much water, a key ingredient in hydraulic fracturing. (messaging – suppose the industry had called it “water stimulation” instead of hydraulic fracturing).

And there’s more, too, The U.S. is commonly portrayed by the egregious Tom Friedman and B. Obama, among others, as being on the sidelines of energy developments in the world. In fact, we are #1 in wind capacity, #1 in biomass (bigger than Brazil), #1 in natural gas, #3 in crude oil (headed for 1 or 2 soon), #2 in coal, # 1 in geothermal and #4 in solar PV.

I did something very nice yesterday: I attended a luncheon at which Victor Davis Hanson spoke. I’ve read his work for years, and knew that I would be in the presence of an intellectual giant. Hanson is an expert in both Classic and military history (not to mention Classic military history). He is also an acute observer of the American political and social scene.

There’s always a risk going in that a Classics scholar’s delivery will dry and dusty, and heavily larded with Latinisms and allusions to long-forgotten historic figures known only to those who have studied them closely. Hanson is not that scholar. Instead, he is the professor you always wished you could have had in college.

Hanson is a focused speaker who uses his unusually wide body of knowledge to support a carefully constructed, well-thought out narrative. He doesn’t waste words. He also doesn’t use sesquipedalian words to impress — nor does he need to. He’s impressive enough speaking in straightforward English. (And yes, it was my little joke to use a ridiculously long word to highlight the fact that Hanson eschews ponderous obfuscation. Yup. Another little — very little — joke.)

So what did Hanson speak about? He spoke about the cusp on which America now finds herself. On the one hand, we see a world in disarray, both at home and abroad. On the other hand, America still towers over other nations when it comes to her people, her resources, and her accomplishments. If America is unable to succeed it will be because we will have followed in the path of other successful nations that disintegrated from within.

Hanson opened by detailing all the facts that should have responsible people worried. The situation abroad his grim. In 2008, Barack Obama promised direct dialog with the North Koreans, Syria, and Iran. Since that time, North Korea has produced a video imagining a joyful future in which North Korea destroys us with a nuclear attack; Syria is in the midst of a bloody civil war, with both sides hating America only slightly less than they hate each other; and Iran gleefully thumbs its nose at the world as it continues work on its nuclear arsenal.

Even as the world’s bad actors — Russia, China, North Korea, Pakistan, Iran, etc. — work to buff their nuclear credentials, Obama is showing his post-election flexibility by promising Russia that America will unilaterally downsize her nuclear arsenal. Those countries within the geographic radius of predatory nuclear nations are (rightly) becoming extremely worried.

In the Middle East, Obama has embraced a bifurcated policy. On the one hand, he leads from behind so that countries such as Egypt, Mali, and Libya can fall into the hands of radical Islamists. On the other hand, his visceral dislike for Netanyahu and Israel gives him an aggressive stance towards that small, democratic nation.

Not only has the Nobel-prize winning President failed to bring about world peace, he’s presided over some of the worst killing in America’s recent wars. Obama has overseen the deaths of as many American troops in four years as George Bush did in eight (not that we hear anything about that from the media). Moreover, the same president who said that it was inhumane and immoral to waterboard three known terrorists has recently announced that he has the unilateral power to use drones to kill American citizens.

I was gratified to hear Hanson make the same point I made during George Bush’s presidency — that his “wild man” persona, no matter how ill-deserved, was an effective deterrent to thugs, because they did not know how he would act under provocation. Obama, though, brings absolutely reliability to the process: When the chips are down . . . he does nothing. This means, Hanson says, that “we’re in a very dangerous period abroad.” Oh, joy.

Things at home aren’t any more cheerful. Hanson, who has an impressive mastery of facts, ran through those gloomy numbers and statistics about the debt, the deficit, the unemployment rate, and the usually flat, but occasionally shrinking, economy.

The only bright spot in Obama’s America is the Left’s/media’s relentless cheerfulness. Having embraced Obama, Hanson notes, the media also embraces a European style economy (not from the hip 60s, but from the decayed 2010s), and calls it good.

California, Hanson’s home state and mine, looks equally grim. Although California has 1/6 of the total American population, it manages to support 1/3 of the nation’s welfare recipients. Despite the highest teacher pay in the US, we’re number 48 in public school education. (California was number 1 in the 1960s and very early 1970s.) And although Californians are forced to fork over the highest taxes in America, we have the worst infrastructure.

These facts are deeply depressing, but there is a bright side, and it’s not that we’re going European. It’s that, if we can find the will, America still has the resources for greatness. To make this point, Hanson pivoted from focusing on the grim news we see in the news every day, and started identifying America’s staggering resources.

Although the U.S. has 6% of the world’s population, we produce 26% of the world’s goods. One American worker is as productive as three Chinese workers.

Our military continues to be the wonder of the world. Even downsized (and Hanson emphasized during the question and answer period that sequestration would slow, rather than reverse, military growth), it will take a long time for other nations to catch up. Even one of our aircraft carriers (and we have eleven) is greater than the carrier strength of the other nations put together. Our problem when it comes to wars, isn’t resources or our troop’s abilities. It’s the leadership’s will to win, or lack thereof.

Despite the shabby state of our primary education system, and despite the political correctness that has destroyed liberal arts programs all over America, when it comes to the hard sciences, the US still leads in higher education. Of the top ten ranked universities in the world, eight are American. And of the top ranked fifteen, five of those are in California.

Either because of, or despite, our education system, America continues to lead the world in technological innovation. In that regard, California’s own Silicon Valley, despite California’s hostile business environment, is still one of the most important intellectual and electronic/technological hubs in the world.

We also lead the world when it comes to exporting our culture. Americans may be fascinated by a variety of indigenous cultures around the world, but everyone else wants to be American. They watch our movies, buy our clothes, listen to our music, mimic our military, copy our educational institutions, and love our food.

Our fundamental strength has long been and, for now, continues to be the fact that we are not a class-based society. Unlike all other countries (whether modern European ones, Latin American banana republics, or Eastern autocracies), people in America do not need the right social or familial connections, the right accent, the right university degree, or the right anything else to succeed. If they’ve got discipline and drive, they’ll rise up, and if they add to that a touch of marketplace genius, the sky’s the limit.

America’s “room at the top” philosophy may explain why America is the only major nation left in the world with a positive demographic growth trend. Not only do immigrants want to come here, but people who live here still believe in having children. With our fertility rate at 2.1, we’re still growing ever so slightly.

The same is not true for the rest of the world. In Japan, said Hanson, the stores sold more diapers last year for old people than they did for babies. All over Europe, countries have negative population growth. China still has 1 billion or so people, but the Chinese one-child policy has ensured that the future will see a dramatically shrunken population. Russia has more abortions than babies.

The Arab world and Iran are in even worse shape. Aside from a catastrophic demographic decline, if one takes away their oil (which is beginning to be tapped out) it turns out that they do not have functioning economies. They have no education, their misogyny means that 50% of their population cannot contribute to their economic well-being, and their controlling doctrine, even more than Islam, is nihilism. When they insist on a world-wide caliphate, they don’t offer any positive vision about this new world. Instead, they threaten only destruction.

At the end of his talk, Hanson half-jokingly said that the Islamist line of argument is “Give us what we want, or we’ll make you as miserable as we are.” Part of America’s diffidence in dealing with Islamists is that we’re unwilling to suffer for short intervals, even if that limited suffering is what it takes to protect entirely us from Islamic nihilism.

The European Union is also a disaster. Not only is it going broke very quickly, it’s completely undemocratic. Once accepted into the EU, countries must abide by its Kafka-esque bureaucratic rulings. Worse, once in, there is no mechanism for dissatisfied countries to leave. (When Hanson said that, it occurred to me that the EU is the governmental equivalent of a Roach Motel: countries check in, but they don’t check out.)

Our wonderful Constitution, despite the current fights over the Second Amendment and the religious component of the First, is mostly intact. Because we have a simple, functioning Constitution, we are the most stable major nation in the world.

America is also fortunate that we have massive amounts of the two things that every society needs to survive: food and fuel. Even the Democrat’s relentless attack on California’s central valley (which sees vast swathes of land reduced to dust in order to protect the Delta Smelt), has not changed our status as the world’s major food producer. Not only do we grow the most food, people like and want American food — it’s clean, safe, and tasty.

We also lead the world in fossil fuel reserves. While the Arab lands are being pumped dry, American ingenuity means that, on private lands all over America, we are starting to produce meaningful amounts of oil and natural gas that can support us at home and leave enough to send abroad. If Obama would allow drilling on federal land, and if democrat-run states would allow drilling on their soil, we would have almost unimaginable amounts of cheap fuel. (Obama, amusingly, used the SOTU to boast about America’s oil production, even as he conveniently forgot to tell the American people that this production is all on private land, since he and many Democrat governors have forbidden it on public land.)

America also continues to be the world’s largest coal producer. [UPDATE: I erred when i said this. Please see a comprehensive correction here.] Surprisingly, given the Left’s war on coal, it’s still a money-maker. Even though the government is preventing its use at home, the rest of the world, especially Europe, is begging for more.

Given America’s vast human and natural resources, why aren’t we doing better? I can stop looking at my notes now, and quote directly from Hanson’s latest article at National Review:

The gradual decline of a society is often a self-induced process of trying to meet ever-expanding appetites rather than a physical inability to produce past levels of food and fuel or to maintain adequate defense. Americans have never had safer workplaces or more sophisticated medical care — and never have so many been on disability.

[snip]

By any historical marker, the future of Americans has never been brighter. The United States has it all: undreamed-of new finds of natural gas and oil, the world’s preeminent food production, continual technological wizardry, strong demographic growth, a superb military, and constitutional stability.

Yet we don’t talk confidently about capitalizing and expanding on our natural and inherited wealth. Instead, Americans bicker over entitlement spoils as the nation continues to pile up trillion-dollar-plus deficits. Enforced equality, rather than liberty, is the new national creed. The medicine of cutting back on government goodies seems far worse than the disease of borrowing trillions from the unborn to pay for them.

[snip]

History has shown that a government’s redistribution of shrinking wealth, in preference to a private sector’s creation of new sources of it, can prove more destructive than even the most deadly enemy.

(You really should read the whole article, which is a pleasing amalgam of ancient history, mid-20th century trends, and our modern condition. It takes a truly great writer and thinker to blend those disparate elements so seamlessly and to arrive at a compelling conclusion.)

If the opportunity to hear Victor Davis Hanson comes your way, seize it. It’s a great pleasure to be in the same room as a speaker who uses his education, knowledge, and intelligence to support fundamental American principles.

Victor Davis Hanson hits it out of the park with his post explaining why higher taxes are not the answer. Some of his twelve reasons are better than others, but all are worthy of your consideration. This is my favorite of the twelve, but I think you’ll like them all:

2) Inequality?

Liberals reply that income inequality is worse than ever. (Note here in their own lives they have no problem with other “merit”-based inequality: e.g., Why can’t Johnny Depp turn down a couple of roles so other less fortunate actors could star? Why doesn’t Cornel West at last break up his endowed mega-salaried professorship into three or four lectureships for the struggling part-timers? Why doesn’t Maureen Dowd go down to one column every other week to allow less compensated New York Times op-ed writers a chance to catch up? In other words, why not back off from the trough and let others have a go?) But back to income inequality: some of those figures are not just attributable to the proliferation of $200,000 orthodontists, but to factoring in the mega-fortunes of a Johnny Depp ($50 million last year in income alone) or a Warren Buffett. The onset of a globalized market allowed a new top bracket to make tens of millions of dollars, a world away from the lesser professional. There is no aggregate homogenous group of “the wealthy.” My big-farming near neighbor (500 acres in vineyard plus), who probably nets $300,000 on a rare good raisin year like this one, is a world away from the late Steve Jobs or the thousands of million-dollar-plus incomes in Silicon Valley. This incongruence is not a rhetorical point or special pleading, but evident through the president’s own rhetoric: “Millionaires and billionaires” is a deliberate attempt to weld two disparate groups together — one making 1000 times the other (if the president is talking of annual income), or one worth 1000 times more than the other (if the president is talking about net worth). But is the Menlo Park bungalow owner who teaches at Foothill College and might be “worth” $1 million (given housing inflation) really comparable to Meg Whitman? Mr. Obama knows that there is not enough of the 1% of the 1% to come up with enough revenue to cover his new $4 trillion in debt, but does he think that by going after the top 5% or 10%, well, there just may be?

I’m actually sensitive to this comparison issue, because Marin skews things. In most other parts of America (other than the other rich liberal enclaves scattered about America), we’d be rich. In Marin, we’re squarely in the middle. Because prices here are so ridiculously high, we live in a middle house, drive middle cars, shop at middle stores, and send our kids to public schools. If we had the same income in Kansas or Texas, we’d be much more comfortably situated — and in Texas, we wouldn’t be turning more than 50% of our money over to the government (state, federal and local).

Of course, we could move, but I like it here: our house is near my aged mother who is too old to be relocated; the temperate climate suits me, because I’m a wuss; and our neighborhood is unique by any standards, providing a truly perfect backdrop to raising decent, honest, nice children.